I'll eat up all your crackers and your licorice

100 Words about Baseball

Why I Love Baseball

There is no clock
90 feet between bases is genius
There are secret signs
Hanging curveballs are sexy
Numbers are magic: 755, 56, 7, 61, 1.12
Tinker to Evers to Chance
Ivy at Wrigley
The Green Monster
The suicide squeeze
Cracker Jack
Walt Whitman liked it
Jackie Robinson and Pee-Wee Reese
It just feels American
The seventh-inning stretch
Superstition
Guys in tight pants
Bull Durham
Centerfield
There’s no crying in baseball
Cooperstown
A great play at the plate
Chatter
Pepper
High socks
Tradition
Spring training
Keeping score
The rubber game
The infield fly rule
162 chances

Become a Fan

#TED Day 3, Session 2: Grow

Natasha TsakosI love the idea that people will sit in a room together and listen, that everyone regardless of their age,race, color, religion, comes together. Our ability to imagine makes us explorers, inventors and creators.

Her performance art is amazing - there is nothing to type but "WOW." To witness it, visit UpWake.

"As a street performer, I've learned that people want to connect. If you are out of the ordinary, they seem to connect more easily - through your mask they are able to lose their own."

"We are not here to question the possible. We are here to challenge the impossible."Evan WilliamsTwitter CEO is taking the stage to talk about Twitter, an idea Chris Anderson thought was "stupid." Twitter was just a side project while they were working on Odeo. The idea was just to give people an easy way to communicate small amounts of information. But the users had different ideas. Users created the @(name) method of responding or talking to other users - Twitter folk just noticed it and worked it into the code. Users grasped it as a way to communicate information ("our special today is chili!" or "the band is playing HERE tonight").

But it wasn't just ordinary life events - Twitter ends up being news coverage - earthquakes, wildfires - all have been topics Twitter's been used to keep people not just updated, but safe. When the gas shortage broke out in Atlanta, people used #atlgas to tag their tweets with information about where to find fuel.

Twitterers' inventiveness gave rise to lots of alert and notifications, like one that lets your plants tweet you when they need water.

"When you give people easier ways to communicate, they are able to do better things."

David MerrillOne of Patti Maes' students in the MIT Media Lab, Merrill shows off a new user interface called Siftables - multimedia blocks that can be manipulated and interact. Great video of how they work here. (His video was messed up but after Rosamund Zander they brought him back and made it work right - when it appears on TED.com no one will ever know there was a glitch.Rosamund ZanderRosamund is greeting us "at the door of her office."

She's recounting a memory of taking a violin lesson and the message she took in about her skill when the teacher said she would have to start over. The result was she never took another lesson. But looking back

This new adulthood is that of human virtuosity - reliable access to an authentic state of being. It emerges spontaneously when we relase ourselves from the programmed patterns of the past. It's who we are being when love and intention go hand in hand and nothing gets in their way."

Can we provide a sustainable, safe and abundant food supply to 10 billion people AND repair the ecosystem? Answer - ABSOLUTELY - vertical farming. All the technologies already exist.

I had no idea hydroponics was developed during WWII to feed Allied soldiers in the South Pacific.

So can vertical farming really work at large scale? Check out EuroFresh.

Willie SmitsIn his lab he has now saved 1000 orangutans - the crowd began to applaud and he cut them off quickly. "No, no no! This is awful! This only indicates our failure to save them in the wild."

Willie Smits just said, "Nature doesn't know monoculture." He began describing the approach his team took and all I could hear was "You can't get from here to there with sameness, without diversity." In order to save the forests - or to be more precise, recreate them - Willie Smits and his team had to use diversity. If they just tried to grow some of the primary rainforest trees, it wouldn't have worked. So they instead grew many things - first came the fast growing trees to create a canopy for the slower growing trees and plants. They had to inject the correct fungi to cycle nutrients into the soil. This Indonesian rainforest could not have been revitalized without diversity.

I could in no way do justice to the ingenious, undeniably practical approach his team takes. To learn more about his work to save orangutans through stopping deforestation, go to Red Apes.

Now Eric Lewis is playing and I wonder if Ben Zander would call this "one-buttock playing." Yes, I think so. I think he's breathing through his eyelid.

Comments

I like the quote of Natasha the street performer. Now I understand the phenomenon of the 'Saw Lady', another street musician (who's name also happens to be Natalia...) - I see her playing the musical saw in the subway in NYC and so many people stop to talk with her. She keeps a blog where she tells what happens when she plays in the subway: http://www.sawlady.com/blog . Yes - people want to communicate and "If you are out of the ordinary, they seem to connect more easily". How true.